This afternoon, Yahoo! Singapore treated the local media to a preview of their latest Yahoo! Mail Beta and Yahoo! Messenger Beta. The Yahoo! Mail Beta was recently launched in US, well, you can try it out today (http://features.mail.yahoo.com/). The new Yahoo! Messenger beta isn’t available yet, but the company assures us it is coming very soon.

Isaac Souweine, product marketing manager for Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Southeast Asia, says the company strives to be the centre of people’s online life, with 273 million users worldwide and 16 million users in Southeast Asia using Yahoo! Mail.

“”We have two Yahoo! Mail release currently on the market: Classic, which has been around for the longest time, and the new Yahoo! Mail which was released a few years ago. Users have the option to switch back to and from either one at any time. The goal for this version of this Yahoo! Mail is to eventually replace both older versions. We are releasing it as Yahoo! Mail Beta for keen users to test it out, give feedback, make improvements and in Q1 2011, we will finish this version of Yahoo! Mail. We will then move all users from the Classic and new Yahoo! Mail to this version by middle of 2011,” Souweine said.

Karen Yeo, product marketing manager for Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Answers and Flickr, Yahoo! Southeast Asia, was next to introduce the new Yahoo! Messenger.

“This is the 11th release for Yahoo! Messenger, which shows we (Yahoo!) are serious about our product, constantly innovating and improving it to bring the best experience to our users.”

Yeo also pointed out some of the new features of the Yahoo! Messenger which include gaming (like Fishville and Mafia Wars); Facebook integration that allows you to chat with your friends on Facebook; Share box functionality whereby when you update your status on Yahoo! Messenger, you can choose to update it on your social network sites like Facebook and Twitter; as well as Yahoo! Messenger on mobile devices.